It is real, you just have to have sufficient funds already to be able to pay someone else to do the active part of the income and make sure they are earning less than their worth so that you can pick up the excess. Most effective if there are many layers in between, so that the income becomes increasingly passive as you move up the chain, so that those under you have something to strive for, because you don’t want to be in charge of hiring all of those people, so you hire people to hire those people, each taking a cut of the value along the way.

But don’t worry, the American Dream™ is that, as long as you keep working about 10 layers deep in value cuts, eventually you might be able to get into layer 3 or 4 and get your kid into the job early so that they can get to layer 5 or 6, and maybe they’ll have enough money to get their kid to 6 or 7.

C could just be a blank and you have to bit blit the arrow on yourself.

I don’t know why, but I still can’t open a core file without going I’m in. I don’t do QA, though, and so tinkering with final breath of my program frozen in time maintains some novelty.

My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I’m really enjoying Typst. It didn’t take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven’t gone too deep into it but I’m excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.

Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.

Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.

If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.

But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.

Yeah, this is the approach people are trying to take more now, the problem is generally amount of that data needed and verifying it’s high quality in the first place, but these systems are positive feedback loops both in training and in use. If you train on higher quality code, it will write higher quality code, but be less able to handle edge cases or potentially complete code in a salient way that wasn’t at the same quality bar or style as the training code.

On the use side, if you provide higher quality code as input when prompting, it is more likely to predict higher quality code because it’s continuing what was written. Using standard approaches, documenting, just generally following good practice with code before sending it to the LLM will majorly improve results.

Every time. Try to get ahead of your work? Well, good for you, that first 20% went really well, now let’s spend the next two weeks on “work” that interferes with your other needs and needs to get thrown out because there’s no way it’s integrating with the other 80% that needs to happen within the next hour and also everything that you did for the other 20% is useless and needs to be redone now that you broke it with that tangent.

It’s been a painful summer “preparing” to teach my fall courses.

I sit somewhere tangential on this - I think Bret Victor’s thoughts are valid here, or my interpretation of them - that we need to start revisiting our tooling. Our IDEs should be doing a lot more heavy lifting to suit our needs and reduce the amount of cognitive load that’s better suited for the computer anyways. I get it’s not as valid here as other use cases, but there’s some room for improvements.

Having it in separate functions is more testable and maintainable and more readable when we’re thinking about control flow. Sometimes we want to look at a function and understand the nuts and bolts and sometimes we just want to know the overall flow. Why can’t we swap between views and inline the functions in our IDE when we want to see the full flow? In fact, why can’t we see the function inline but with the parameter variables replaced by passed values to get a feel for how the function will flow and compute what can be easily computed (assuming no global state)?

I could be completely off base, but more and more recently - especially after years of teaching introductory programming - I’m leaning more toward the idea that our IDEs should be doubling down on taking advantage of language features, live computation, and co-operating with our coding style… and not just OOP. I’d love to hear some places that I might be overlooking. Maybe this is all a moot point, but I think code design and tooling should go hand in hand.

The beatings will continue until morale productivity improves.

Edit: Sorry, morale is irrelevant.

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Yeah, I knew freelance folks who provided long term support with such complicated setups. The base daily rate plus hourly with a monthly retainer and weekly on call fees. Wild.

Or, hourly = extremely high paid contract work.

When I teach story points (not in an official Agile Scrum capacity, just as part of a larger course) I emphasize that the points are for conversation and consensus more than actual estimates.

Saying this story is bigger than that one, and why, and seeing people in something like planning poker give drastically differing estimates is a great way to signal that people don’t really get the story or some major area wasn’t considered. It’s a great discussion tool. Then it also gives a really rough ballpark to help the PO reprioritize the next two sprints before planning, but I don’t think they should ever be taken too seriously (or else you probably wasted a ton of time trying to be accurate on something you’re not going to be accurate on).

Students usually start by using task-hours as their metric, and naturally get pretty granular with tasks. This is for smaller projects - in larger ones, amortizing to just number of tasks is effectively the same as long as it’s not chewing away way more time in planning.

You check the clock. You check again, because you didn’t actually read the time because you were too absorbed in the process of checking the clock that you forgot to check the clock.

You check the clock again. You have a new email. You consider checking the clock again, but give up and accept your fate because checking the clock a (second? Third? Tenth? First?) time is just too much right now, you’re already running late anyways so it was kind of all procrastinating in the first place. You don’t even know what you were supposed to be checking it for. Just wait and see, it’s probably not that important. Maybe you’ll check the clock and see if it sparks your memory.

You check the clock. You finally see the time. The bus drives past you.

The ways we cope and overcome, and the ways we don’t.

Yeah I probably should have added the /s to that one.

Windows 11 has tabbed file explorer, a package manager, it’s quick, the interface looks nice and feels nice, and it’s been really stable for me. I don’t know where the complaints are at, it’s been great. All they need to do is regress all of the ads-in-your-OS stuff from 10. Bring back the start menu that doesn’t hang for 30 seconds looking something up online before showing you your installed programs.

Soap. 100%.

I’ve gotten by too long and too successfully letting my impulses keep everything chugging along well enough that now that there’s a massive range of responsibility, dependence upon me, and deadlines with major consequences, hoping I’ll impulsively get around to things had begun putting a painful spotlight on previously undiagnosed ADHD.

I think the key to learning is to not do the thing out of impulse, but to train setting a goal of doing the thing and then painstakingly doing nothing until that thing is done. That’s the skill to train, not the thing that’s getting done.

But now, I’ll just wait for the time that that skill is the impulsive thing to work on and keep on keeping on.

I know this post and comment might sound shilly but switching to more expensive microfibre underwear actually made a big impact on my life and motivated me to start buying better fitting and better material clothes.

I’d always bought cheap and thought anything else was silly. I was wrong. So much more comfortable, I haven’t had a single pair even begin to wear down a little bit, less sweating and feel cleaner, fit better, and haven’t been scrunchy or uncomfortable once compared to the daily issues of that cheap FotL life. This led to more expensive and longer lasting socks with textures I like better, better fitting shoes that survive more than one season.

It was spawned by some severe weight loss and a need to restock my wardrobe. My old underwear stuck around as backups to tell me I needed to do laundry, but going back to the old ones was bad enough that I stopped postponing laundry.

Basically, I really didn’t appreciate how much I absolutely hated so many textures I was constantly in contact with until I tried alternative underwear and realized you don’t have to just deal with that all the time.